The forever ache

He’s gone. A son has left this Earth. Dead. Murdered. And his parents must live on …

Here yesterday, breathing and eating, playing with his own son of two years old. Talking to his father where the chain of three – the son playing with the father who talks to his father – is strong and intertwines with those soul fibres we cannot see but only feel.

This morning, that connection is gone and the link is broken to swing wildly in howling gales as it desperately attempts to grasp at something to counter that missing link. It will swing forever, now that a son is gone to that land of somewhere else.

A chasmic abyss gapes, where a father and mother will struggle to manoeuvre the black hole within. Pining aches within hearts far heavier than all hearts together can bear, and so devastating and crushing that they will never mend or repair.

There is no end, just deep, dark grief. Blackness. A suffering beyond all others that grows emotion in the heart of any parent.

I sit by my son’s bed today, where those emotions swell in my own heart, for my own children who last night looked up at the ceiling of our dining room where we ate together, at the twenty plus tiny spiders that Harriet Huntsman has just given birth to … their awe at that life in its own ecosystem above us, of which we’re part of, and their reluctance to disturb it. Because it is life.

As I sit here and my son nuzzles the side of his face into the cup of my hand, preparing to wake for a new day of opportunity, his warmth exudes to fill me with an instant glow that no other can give. It’s a glow that can so desolately be wrenched from me without any notice.

The vulnerability to life is real. A flick of a switch or click of a finger can finish it, end it to give way to an avalanche of pining aches that swirl floods that want to burst.

Today, a son’s life is gone, snatched by another. Pining aches in hearts will last forever.